Full Circle Associates

Firehawk’s Sacred Digital Mirrors
Intro by David Sibbet: Firehawk Hulin – began his life in England, half of parentage is Cajun, wonderfully juicy person. Was in professional media, making lots of money and burning out. Ten years of studying with Native American teachers, medicine wheel, embedding understanding about how we live and work. Life’s purpose is to bring forward these medicine teachings with his wife Pele. Coleader of the Thought Leader dialog. Monterrey Institute for Social Architecture – gathering of players looking to play the infinite game.

Graphic recording by David Sibbet

Music, invite you to come sit by the fire in a place in Second Life called Third Life created by David Sibbet, Singing Heart (Michele Paradise). (GET SCREEN SHOT OF SPACE). This is a virtual medicine wheel. A place that mirrors some of the places that humans have met in for thousands of years. Sat at the fire together. Heard each others words and sought the wisdom that can only come from our collective heart. When I first heard about second life I had the same reaction p- interesting distraction, but what does it have to do with the sacred. In the last three months have been having amazing sacred experiences in this space. 5-6 of us gather Sunday evenings to devise and practice holding a wisdom council in cyberspace. There are 8 doors in the medicine wheel. In each one represents 1/8 of the energies of wholeness that come up from thousands of years of observing the earth and her systems. IN the east, where the sun rises, the energies are freedom and creativity. The people sitting in the east watch out for what is needed for freedom and creativity to be available to all people. Where are we enslaved. Wanted to start here because not usually allowed to have a fire in a ballroom at hotels. From my name, fire is essential to me. When I was 44 you could count on one hand number of times I have sat at a fire. Now more fingers than in the room. We remember who we are when we sit a the fire.

Start today with an old technology with relevance for the days we are in. It is called, stringing the beads. Figure out how we can get in an absolute circle. In 1992 met mixed blood couple who became my teachers. Taught a process called stringing the beads. Each bead is unique, but held together by a single thread. Passing the thread around to identify who is present. Inconceivable to think about getting to business before we know who is here. I wondered how this would fit in business. In the last 4-5 years more and more friends who are consultants are using a form of this practice in their work so we hear from everybody. Doesn’t have to be formal, but sometimes it is good to be formal, in a circle, listen with our hearts open to whatever comes. There are 16 of us. If we take about 1.5 minutes each and hear each of us speak to the question similar to what Ole talked about, but what brings you here from your own perspective. What called you to this room on your own journey. What brings you to this particular room. What spark, what call. (Putting computer down to participate.

Back to Firehawk telling his story – malcolmcohan.com – a million people sharing their vision statements with short videos. I want you to make a vision video that is a minute long. 60 seconds bit. On yourself. I want to start with my vision. I made this for myself. I watch it every morning. It turns me on. It kicks but, I get up and say YES! It’s great. What I show it to other people it creates other ripples. Malcom is giving away the software for PCs to enable that. Get the free stuff on a PC. Working on the Mac stuff. There is software for Mac that is so good.

I want to start with the vision piece. It is really important that we have positive images of the future that we want to live in to. Who do I want to be. Amazing that I don’t have grandchildren when wife and I have six children. I really want to see the world I want to have for those children, to help create for those children.

(Moving our eyes to the screen to watch the video)

firehawk@Resonance.to

Q: How many times have you seen that. Roughly several hundred, I would guess, since I made it. I watch it pretty much every day. I’m using it as a reminder to me of who I am and what I care about and the path I can see going forward. It is on YouTube. Many people have checked it out. I’m not marketing vision videos other than that they are possible.

In 1972 started my first audio visual company - for 22 years industrial rock and roll. Large meeting, multimedia, multiple projection all the way to digital video. What I was aware of that it always made a big impact at the time but not much lasting difference. IN 1990 my career took a left turn when I met Bill Veltrop and the international center for organizational design. Calling people who had technologies of change who were not talkig to each other. Found myself fascinated by that realm. Then I met my teachers. All fo the media work for a decade sat. Then when I completed my apprenticeship in 2000 the world had changed. In the last 2 years it has all changed. IN 3-4 hours you can make something that can inspire you. Make a3-4 minute statement about what you see for yourself is a powerful act. There is a collective part to it.

A couple of months ago went to meeting of 12 mental health professionals using story to bring wholeness and wellness. In 4.5 hours from scratch created a 5 minute vision video. Had a high speed connection, wrote a poem, some took a nap, we found copyright cleared images, put them together with a soundtrack and 6pm put it on the screen. A very empowering experience to do that in that short of time. That’s what’s going on. I used to spend thousands of dollars an hour in a studio to do this work. It is intuitive and faster.

Jen: My father was in a similar business in Chicago. I was a little girl, we used to go look at the huge equipment that was all part of making TV and video. Now it is in your lap.

I start with music. The way I make film it always comes first in the music. I don’t write words or think of visuals until I hear the music. This is a piece of copyright free music from http://www.musicbakery.com There are so many of them now. Musicbakery is mid priced. This was $29 to use. http://www.stock20.com will sell you individual tracks for $7. Good flowing movie making music. You can get license to use popular music. I did a project for the International Museum of Women. Called the artist directly he said call his agent. Agent asked how much I wanted to pay for it. I said $250. He said “too much, why don’t you send me $100.” There is something going on in music. If I want a particular piece of popular music, work with someone with a broad license on that song. But the free music and copyright clear music. I start with the music.

I wanted to have all that as context for this next piece. The reason I called this the sacred digital mirror, one of the first technologies of transformation that called me was Appreciative Inquiry. Look at the world as a miracle. Seek the best that we are. I love photography and I love people. I like to take pictures that mirror to people how magnificent they are and put that on the screen whenever I can. I want to partner with world class facilitators, visual practitioners. Peter Garn who was at HP and now independent. Now doing work at Cabrillo college. Were going to have a three hour visioning session for a master planning session with the whole community. Never before engaged the whole community. They called everyone together on flex week before Fall semester. 200+ staff, faculty, admin. 150- people showed up. Dana White worked the boards, Peter facilitated and I shot 1500 pictures in three hours. Then I went home, had a bite to eat and made this. Showed it the next day to the board at noon. Didn’t get much sleep, but it carried the immediacy of what happened. Then showed it to the whole school at the end of the week for close of Flex week. We took and shot the boards and put them in 11/17 print outs and the movie and gave the CD to all the groups working on the master planning. They use this to start the next round of meeting. Again, not trying to tell the linear story. The mirroring of the energy and spirit in the room.

(video)

It opened the door to what these kinds of collaboration can look like. To weave the charts with the emotional content of people seeing themselves and being mirrored back in that way. Thoughts?

Jenn: interesting with this piece and the other one. You start with music. For me it is visual. The faces. Those faces were beautiful. Everyone of them. So human. I have a four year old and I take a lot of pictures of her. Every image shows a different emotional range. When I create summary documents, I create what you have there but on paper. I start with what the meeting was like – excited, happy, sad, new , old. I go online and search for an image that resonates for me the tone of that meeting. Takes 20 minutes or hours. Hit or miss. For those that process visually, by reading, by music. Covering, touch everybody on one of those three levels. For me it was the faces.

Linda: There are lots of areas of overlap. Our meetings are very experiential, with a ton of multimedia. We do vision montages in the visioning process. We need to do them more. We do a lot of high ropes courses. One thing we found – volume was turned up to 12 on this – when training photogs to shoot the course, we have finalcut pros do backflips to turn it around the next day. Finding moments of expression of emotion and open the next day with the previous day’s video. Gives permission to be emotive. Before we say a word we dim the light and show the video from the day before. It matters what the music, but the images will always fit the music as the music carries the emotion. Anytime you allow people in the room to expand their emotional vocabulary together. We in front of the room define the size of the room. The ceiling can be high or low. To make that room bigger for people. There is nothing like a human image to do that. Where is the emotion in the image vs the action or conclusion. Not intuitive but powerful.

FH: When I started we used to process the slides in the bathtub with a fish heater. Dip and dunk the film, trash the bathroom in the hotel. Cut the slide sup and put them in the 30 slide projectors. We would not sleep very much to do that. I was asked by one of our pathwalker friends, she asked me to come to Univ CA San Francisco to an accountants meeting she was running to photograph the people. TO show them themselves at the end of the day. The day was wonderful because accountants don’t’ get to talk to each other much. It went to another level when they saw my mirror and I did not break a sweat doing it. Shot 7:1 to 10:1 ratio of images. Edit intuitively. Order and reorder on the computer, figure out the track and I’m done. 4pm it is on the screen. We had a closing circle, they had not planeed, wanted to talk about what they were feeling. It is a part of our emotional intelligence that often does not show up at meetings. Power in the partnership – the images on the wall make great connective tissue. You can’t have to photoshop them. Just shoot the wall and weave them into the pictures. Makes a lot of sense to me.

Janine: when you were choosing the audio, that was intuitively – didn’t run it by someone to get approval? No, I won’t work that way. Those messages are powerful – it recognizes the driving needs of people. Across every department… how have you seen the audio, these messages push the planning or strategy forward? You have to act on that. “We need resources.”

FH: The challenge that junior colleges have is to reinvent themselves. Population is dropping. They have to serve a whole lot of – a friend of ours has created an amazing answer. He takes at risk and super at risk young people, mostly Hispanic who would normally have no attempt to college and he accelerates them to college level in a semester. Lots of grants because it is really working. Took the best OD stuff from Harvard business and started applying that in a new realm. Now getting grants to replicate in other colleges.

Jenn: that’s a vision for you. That is happening in other places. Some clients have donated graphic facilitator time to local orgs to get their leadership off the ground. To do this organizational development. Sharing success story – we’ve seen improvement in Richmond public schools which was one of the worst in the nation now people are calling them to ask how they are doing their turn around. Take the best parts and move it forward. If everyone does a little bit you have a vision for the future for these kids who are the future.

David: Digital Bridge Academy brought me in to help sell the idea, using templates like Ole with the kids, kids doing fabulous scenario work, infiltrating faculty meetings. In some ground that has been somewhat cultivated. Coming to the emotional piece. Can’t take one ingredient as causal. Very contextual. That’s why the partnering is so important, finding the partners we are supposed to do to do the great work. There’s this huge opportunity to grow different organisms to really redesign the social forms we grew up in.

Bill: Thinking about groups in conversation with a person leading/facilitating, that hierarchy of what we do from this morning. Through that leadership and collaboration that end result we record graphically but you recorded with sounds and pictures and graphics mixed in. Maybe where we are heading to is that person doing the collaboration leadership. The maestro aspect of how you put all that together. There is some kind of chemistry, magic that goes on in that person that makes it all happens in a way that is ahead of the normal.

FH: the leap that I made, originally saw medicine wheel as separate from my media career. But I design with wheels. What is needed to make up the whole. There are 140 different wheels. Things in the east relate to a certain energy. That’s how I get quickly to the flow. Using that as a design tool. Where is the energy of adventure, nurture, strategist. Outrageous. Let the wheel inform what I do. Old wisdom and new technology come together.

Susi: reflecting that energy and helping people see, by being human and speaking from the heart they can do great work, communicate and facilitate by being like you.

Can you learn that?

You have it, it is inside each of us. What I love about medicine wheel is that there is no pathological element. You are a sacred human being who came here to learn and grow. Imagine relating to our children like that. Each of us has this gift. If we don’t give it, you have terrible bad luck. You gotta give the gift and it is often not obvious. You can’t do this stuff as a sound bite. That’s why I like working over years with people, time to evolve together.

Linda: Someone asked what do you do to move the strategy forward. How we use this, at the end of the day people feel how they want to feel. Ropes allow people to experience themselves being un-self conscious working optimally together without working hard. Show them a mirror to remind them of that then asking what gets in our way of being like this all the time. How we want to be together as a team, how we are with our families when we don’t have to think about it. What obstacles do we have to remove at work. How do you move us forward, the practical application, to forge a culture together to execute a strategic plan. Almost a gap analysis. This is how we want to be, how we are and what strategies to put in place to become who we want to be.

Cheryl- a possibility statement, not a gap analysis.

FH: You have to have the ability to hold a lot of complexity. You need a social system to hold you together as you go through the birth canal. Circle, being together, really hearing from each other. Just play with me. Stories are told. It shifts the game. It si not about a technique or a thing. The old people said, we are life, it is all one thing. We are not separate. We have to find a way organizationally to not be separate. To come into a different relationship.

Bill: From your perspective, you talk about linking the old with the new. Is there anything about the act of linkage that is new because the new has changed it. Are people doing, thinking, creating conceptualizing ideas differently?

FH” yeah, people are evolving. We have to design processes to evolve consciously. Global warning is not something happening to us. It is part of life and calling us to a higher purpose. To cataclysm or apocalypse. I want to stand in the room where people say “yes, and.”

Bill: Do you ever come to the day where you change the way you do it?

FH: I’ve had a lot of experience writing the word first. But now I have control of production so I can say how it goes. The box is the tool I control. Creations are more powerful.

Deirdre: In graphic recording, you get to decide too. The are trusting your skill and intuition .

FH: Graphic recorders have elephant ears. Hear in incredible ways. Mezmerizing to see it unfold on the board, adding value in the room in real time.

Jenn: Anyone can learn how to put their thoughts and ideas out there. You don’t have to be an artist or musician to put y our vision on a screen in a way anyone can identify with. The Lord of the Rings trilogy – those three movies had to wait for CGI to be made that good. You can make anything look real on a screen with media. If that is your vision, we have the technology to take your vision out there in a way you can identify with and resonate with. An evolution in our selves and in technology.

One last piece to show you.

Software for mac – fotomagico - $30 – it takes what iPhoto does to a whole other level. It is really good. Going to share a piece of media I created this morning in fotomagico

(video)

(music – everything is holy now)

That’s the sacred digital mirror. To even conceive of shooting, editing 490 pictures 71 in the show and then putting the soundtrack and synchronize it to feel the way it feels. Could put rock and roll and it feels different.

How long in minutes to make it ? Edited pictures last night for an hour. Sorting, use Apple’s aperture, make a copy of files then delete and select images that resonate. An hour. Then started doing this at 10:30 and David came in at 12. 2.5 hours start to finish and the time shooting yesterday in the world café.

Fred: I told a little lie yesterday. Someone sitting beside me had a camera, and saw you shooting. “I’m not going to take any because they have a professional here. He has a bigger lens than you. “ It was a lie. You create wonderful pictures.

What Fotomagico does – it has, the way the code is written it maximizes the quality of the image. This is not a bright project nor well color balanced. It lets you blow things up, zoom in without losing, without them falling apart. I’m shooting 2000x3000 raw files and its doing something with that. I can zoom, rotate and pan. You can control on a timeline linke in final cut pro so things can hit on the music. The choreography.

Do you design for worst case projectors? Take what you have. The room was very dark. Love shooting in daylight but often ballrooms are dark. I push that then lightened up 80%. I can set a program to lighten all the images. Do that in aperture.

N: Now people are doing this collectively, remixing each other, holding mirrors up to each other.

FH would like to have a conference while playing with each others stuff, a team of people doing that. Collaborative juice of other people surprising me. Last serious movie was four young people and four gray beards.

Bill: Do you not need the maestro?

FH: I don’t see it as maestro. It’s like – my job now is very different than when I started my company in 1972 fresh out of college. I see that the next generation of maestros are on the planet doing stuff. What I love is being able to share the connection to the earth with all of this. My credo – VOOM – Voice of Our Mother is at the Table. This is a means to express this. Don’t think of this as “my thing.” I love giving it away. Turning people on to how to do it. That’s where I’m at. In terms of the larger game, the high priesthood of media creation died with the digital age. What we’ll see in 10 years will blow our mind.

Ole: Now everything is on computers. Next higher level of working with information with bits and bytes. What do you think we’ll be seeing?

FH: thread that I see – much more like the holodeck on Startreck. Step into a program and work with it.

N: The Ted video of the tool that allows you to physically move things with your hands

FH: Second life, calls you to create. I didn’t want to get sucked in, but what David created, oh my goodness. I cherish the time. It is not ‘instead of” with huge implications for teaching people earth wisdom.

David: Trying to track what is different in that medium, not amplifying something else. It is truly collaborative writing. Chat is a slow poetic medium when done interactively. Downloading chat as serious writing. There are other people in the writing, in the conversation.

(GOT involved in conversation and did not scribe )

People who are disempowered F2F can be totally empowered in these new environments. Things happening at a fast pace. Cross currents.

Thank you.